Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Lord Wolf, hardened soldier and expert lover, has come to King Henry
VIII's court to claim his new bride: a girl who has intrigued him since
he first saw her riding across the Yorkshire moors.

Eloise Tyrell, now
lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne Boleyn, has other ideas. She has no desire
to submit to a man she barely knows and who-though she is loath to
admit it-frightens her more than a little.

Their first kiss awakens in both a
fierce desire that bares them to the soul. But as the court erupts into
scandal around the ill-fated Queen, Eloise sees firsthand what happens
when powerful men tire of their wives...

I'm a fan of most Tudor fiction, and a few years ago, I read pretty much everything ever written about Henry VIII and his respective wives. The blurb and cover for Wolf Bride drew me in, though I was disappointed in what lay after the table of contents.

Eloise Tyrell, like most ladies-in-waiting of Henry VIII's respective queens, are at court to achieve something, typically a good marriage. Eloise's father, a widower, wants this for both his daughters, so he contrives to match Eloise to Lord Wolf rather than the young courtier she is attracted to.

When Wolf Bride began to depict Lord Wolf as a dominant, hard man, that's when I tuned out. I'm sad to say this happened in the first half of the novel. I did not read Fifty Shades of Grey -- nor do I ever plan to -- so to see Eloise submit to a man she's a little afraid of and not attracted to didn't attract me as a reader. And when Eloise discovers she ultimately loves Wolf despite him ignoring her outside of their bedroom, keeping secrets from her, well, I skimmed from there until the end.

(A very special thank you to Sourcebooks Casablanca and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of Wolf Bride.)